Caught Bread Handed: A Bakeshop Mystery by Ellie Alexander

              I will be honest with you.  I almost didn’t read this book.  That’s because I read the preview segment for the next book in the series and I misread what was written.  I did this because I was looking to see if Jules’s husband was still going to be in the picture.  If he was, I was not going to bother reading this book.  For awhile I thought Carlos was in the following book because he was mentioned pretty quickly, leaving me to put this one aside for weeks while I decided what to do.  Then I re-read the passage.  When I did this, I realized that yes, Carlos is mentioned, but, at least with the first part, he is not actually in the book itself.  He may show up later, but not having him in the first part made me decide to go forward with Caught Bread Handed, as I figured the mystery and the other characters were worth putting up with Carlos one more time.

                A new restaurant has opened in the quaint town of Ashland, Oregon, but it is not like all the others.  Bright and loud, the restaurant in no way fits in with the other Shakespeare-themed businesses and classic-style buildings.  This upsets many of the townspeople, but with Jules working to keep her bakery, Torte, going and dealing with Carlos, her estranged ex-husband, she has not had much time to pay attention to anything else around her.  What someone else is doing with their business and how it fits in is going to be the last thing on Jules’s mind.

                At least it is until Jules finds the restaurant owner, Mindy Nolan, dead.  Not only is she dead, but the condition Jules finds her in is quite gruesome.  An unsettling scene all on its own, the information that comes out about the murder makes the entire situation worse.  As the investigation goes on, the timeframe for when the murder could have happened becomes smaller and smaller.  Eventually it reaches the point that had Jules come upon the scene only a few minutes earlier, she could have walked in on the killer in the act.  Now Jules really wants to know who killed Mindy and why.

                Even though I was hesitant to read this book at first, I’m glad I did.  As usual, the mystery was good, and I’m happy to see Jules and Thomas get their friendship back.  Other characters I like got relationship difficulties figured out as well.  Then there was Carlos.  I don’t know if there was a single part he was in that I really liked.  Once again, as with the last book, Jules let Carlos take over her hard work.  He made decisions about the bakery and tried to pull pranks in Jules’s kitchen as though it were his own.  When things went crazy in the bakery, somehow Carlos was conveniently never there.  Then came the fact that Carlos always asked Jules to give up everything she had worked for and come with him back to the cruise ship they both used to work on.  Never did he offer to give up his work so Jules could pursue hers.  Somehow it was always his career that was mandatory and hers was disposable.  Between these things and what happened in the last book, I am really not a fan of Carlos.  Which is why I am happy to say (I’m going to ruin something here) Carlos is at least physically gone by the end of this book.  He is not gone entirely, of course, but having Carlos removed from the situation so Jules can figure out what is truly best for herself makes me happy.  I am hoping that is exactly what happens for Jules, not only for the character’s sake, but because I would hate to have to stop reading these books because of one character.  If Carlos fully returns though, that may be exactly what I have to do.